The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
by David Brion Davis
Summary
David Brion Davis set out to answer a question earlier historians had mostly treated as settled: how did centuries of Western civilization, steeped in Christian teaching and classical philosophy, live comfortably with slavery for so long, and what finally made abolition thinkable. Rather than studying slavery within one country's economy, Davis takes a broad, multinational view stretching from antiquity through the late eighteenth century, tracking how theologians, philosophers, and lawyers across Europe and its colonies justified holding other human beings as property, and how, slowly and unevenly, an opposing moral argument began to take hold.
Davis treats ideology not as a smokescreen over material interest but as the actual lens through which people of a given era understood their own world, and he reads religious and philosophical texts on their own terms to trace how a system so thoroughly embedded in law, economics, and custom could ever come to look intolerable to the very cultures that had built it. The book moves through classical justifications for slavery, medieval and early modern religious debate, and the eighteenth century currents, Enlightenment rationalism among them, that finally produced organized opposition.
It is a work of intellectual history rather than a narrative of individual lives, dense with argument and close reading of primary sources, and it suits a reader more interested in how ideas about slavery changed over centuries than in a single dramatic account of the institution itself. Davis wrote it as the opening study in what became a lifelong project, and later historians have treated it as a founding text of modern slavery studies as a distinct field.
Historical Context & Significance
Cornell University Press published the book in 1966, and it won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, launching Davis toward a career built almost entirely around the history of slavery and its abolition; Oxford University Press reissued it in 1988, a sign of how long the book stayed in active classroom and scholarly use. Davis went on to write two further volumes tracing the same subject into the age of revolution and beyond, distinct books that won their own separate honors years later rather than extending this one's prize.
Davis spent most of his career at Yale, where he later founded a research center devoted to the study of slavery, resistance, and abolition, and colleagues have credited him with doing more than any other scholar of his generation to reshape how historians understand slavery's place in American, hemispheric, and world history. The book remains the starting point most historians of the subject still assign first.